Web 2.0 Goes to Work

Time was when about the only method charities had to raise money was to go door to door.

Then, direct mail. Oh, and those annoying calls at dinner time.

But,
the world of Web 2.0 has offered a new voice to charities - and a
secondary voice of bloggers and other web 'luminaries' lending THEIR
voice to the charity.

A good example is Paul Mooney and his quest to raise money for the Charity:Water
organization. Their goal is to give 150,000 people in Ethiopia access
to safe, clean drinking water. Paul's blog entry about it is here,
and to date he's apparently raised nearly $2,000. His birthday was in
September and he blogged "this is what I want for my birthday. A
donation ..."

What's interesting is that Paul's blog post came
to me via RSS, and a number of other bloggers in the community picked
it up also ... and then there were Tweets about it and suddenly Paul's
single voice had grown into a chorus. All thanks to Web 2.0.

I
donated in Paul's name, and if you're so inclined, you should too. We
may have missed his official birthday (September 1), but I don't think
he'll mind a belated present.

Squidoo
itself is one of those strange sites that sits somewhere between search
engine and social bookmarking - and a large percentage of the money
they make from advertising, etc., is given away anyway.

So, they've engaged the community to help them give away money.

Once again, if you're so inclined, visit Squidoo and vote. Participate.

The common thread here is the sense of community ... it's a far cry from going door to door.

This blog is NOT intended as a
product-specific blog, and we'll always stop short of out and out product
pitches. But, every now and then one of the 'children' does really well,
and we want to shed some light on the topic.

Such was the case yesterday
with the "shootout" between Microsoft Sharepoint and Lotus
Connections.

Let's just say the concensus was that Connections won, hands
down. Steve Cogan posted some of these responses on his blog, but don't take our word for it ... here's what the blogosphere is
saying.

Yesterday was the "Web 2.0 Primer" session at the Rational Software Developers Conference.

Rather than re-post all the links, I'll refer you to the post I made over at Domino Unplugged.

Today was a great day, starting with the keynotes by IBM Software Group head Steve Mills and IBM Fellow Grady Booch, ending with all sorts of BOFs, receptions and even a visit for a few lucky souls to Cirque du Soleil ...

As mentioned in the comments for Sunday's post, check the #RSDC hash on Twitter for minute-by-minute updates ... (check out Summarize ...)

Delighted to be down in Orlando with all the Rational folks (that's Rational with a capital R, incidentally, as in Rational Software).

The Rational Software Developer Conference (RSDC) started today, and will run through Thursday. I'm lucky enough to be presenting a "Web 2.0 Primer" tomorrow morning ... I'll give you a full report as to how it goes, plus provide all the links I demo with ...

He points us first to Robert Scoble's recent post "Why Google News has no noise." Says Scoble:"Im a noise junkie. I used to be a news junkie, but Ive hung out with
the worlds top journalists enough now to see that the good ones are
noise junkies."I like the noise. Why? Because I can see patterns before anyone else. I
saw the Chinese earthquake happening 45 minutes before Google News
reported it. Why? Because I was watching the noise, not the news."

McKendrick picks up on the topic, taking it a couple steps farther:" ...it can be concluded that if youre listening to the noise these days,
its telling you that people are starting to listen to the noise."

Per Chris:"Currently many companies already have teams in place to handle the constant flow of email that is sent in or submitted via web forms. What is so different in moving to such tools as Twitter. They just came from a phone only support model with tons of operators. Email was the next migration, followed quickly by instant messaging. Now with presence costing tons for companies to have a proper anonymous instant messaging support, free tools such as Twitter beg to be utilized."

Can't promise there will be a tremendous number of Tweets, particularly initially ... but if you add web20work to follow, we'll do our best to keep you updated on what's happening with this blog, and with the Web 2.0 initiative in general ...

More and more organizations are utilizing Web2.0 technique to connect with customers (and potential customers), partners and the like.

Need to give credit to RedMonk's James Governor for bringing to my attention that fact that Southwest Airlines has joined the ranks of organizations using the blogosphere to interact with their customers.

The blog site is Nuts About Southwest and, unlike a number of other corporate blogs (like the Fastlane Blog from GM's Bob Lutz), Southwest's blog has a number of contributors, and they appear to be representative of a cross-company sampling of employees.

IBM, obviously, has had a two-way conversation with its customers and partners for a number of years (and numerous IBMers are represented at numerous blogs) ...

Nice to see so many others joining the two-way trend!

NOTE: I have no knowledge whether IBM has anything to do with this site, including hardware, software or services. We may, we may not. I don't know ... regardless, you are free to move about the country.

This won't come as much of a shock to anyone actually working for Big Blue, but Business Week thought it was newsworthy enough to put out a lengthy article on how Big Blue Embraces Social Media.

Over the past two years, IBM has been busily launching in-house
versions of Web 2.0 hits. "We're trying to see how things that are hot
elsewhere can be fit for business," says Irene Greif, an IBM Fellow who
heads up Collaborative User Experience.

He cites email, blogging and Twittering, and points out that there's a different audience model for each:

Technically both blogs and Twitter are open to anyone. However,
Twitter provides a single place for people to "stumble upon" someone
they don't already read. Planet Lotus provides a similar experience
for Lotus related blogs, by aggregating them all into a single place.
So Twitter is more "open", but I get several thousand readers on my
blog per day, and only several hundred on Twitter. So which is a more
effective mechanism for me to get information out there?

I won't repeat the whole thing here, but suggest you check out his post.

There has been a lot of chatter recently (twittering?) about the relative merits of services like Twitter. Gia Lyons, for example, had an interesting series of posts (start HERE) on the merits of Twitter (we miss you Gia!). Alan Lepofsky recently had a post about Twitter. So, Twitter is reaching critical mass.

Now comes word of a site that uses Twitter to give up to the minute information about the Disney Theme Parks.

Welcome to the "Web 2.0 Goes to Work" (W20GTW) blog on IBM's brand new public Connections site. Nice to have you stop by!

This blog will be the home of several IBM bloggers, some of whom
you may already know (based on their pre-existing blogging activity)
and some you may not. But, either way we hope that they'll be adding to
the conversation and collective intelligence about Web 2.0.

It's certainly not our intention to make this an IBM product
pitch site. We'll talk about IBM products, certainly, but we're really
here to talk about Web 2.0 techniques and technologies.